It began with some young fellows expressing themselves freely, delivering themselves of their honestly held views, using their entitlement to free speech, as is their perfect right, this being a democratic society and all that. They said things like "P*ki" and "Get those Muslims". Which is their perfect democratic right, what with free speech and one thing and another. And then, in an apparently unrelated sequence of events, a Muslim student had his head fractured. Then, some nights later, approximately thirty of said young fellows set upon a number of Muslim students with bricks, poles and sticks, stabbing two of them. They also stabbed a bypasser who tried to intervene. And all of this has no connection to anything anyone might have said - about Muslims, about Asians, about 'British values', or indeed about anything else. And it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the promotion of far right racist politics in the mainstream media.